DroidCustomFont

The DroidCustomFont is an Android library project that provides simple view elements (currently only supports TextViews) that allow the simple usage of different cutom fonts.

Project overview

• lib - The library project that can be referenced from an Android project.
• sample - An Android demo app that demonstrates how to use the DroidCustomFont.

About the idea

Android 4.0 introduced "Roboto" as new standard font for Android devices. As his predecessor "Droid", the font was designed to look good on mobile displays and using it leads to an Android look&feel.

Sometimes this is just not what one is looking for. Mabe a customer has a corporate font that is needed to be used throughout an app. Or a very different font typeface is associated with a specific UI element e.g. a digital clock display using a red pixel-styled typeface reminds of an historical LED watch.

Using custom fonts with Android is sadly not directly possible via xml layouts. Instead the developer is forced to do the following lines for every TextView:

// Load each font that shall be used in the following way
Typeface font = Typeface.createFromAsset(getAssets(), "font_name.ttf");
// Find each text view that shall use custom fonts
TextView textView = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textview);
// Assign the font as typeface
textView.setTypeface(font);

This may be fine for one-time usage as in the watch example. But with the corporate designed app this manual modifcation of each TextView is very time-consuming, error-prone and requires an unique id for each View, even when it only contains static text.

In addition the layout files do not represent the real font usage and lead to bad readability of the project. Not only is the font name missing from the layouts, but there is another problem hidden: The Android system is not supporting to change the style of a font when using a custom typeface. Applying for example android:textStyle="bold" doesn't trigger the expacted font appearance. Instead each TextView must be assigned the according typeface e.g. "regular", "light", "bold" of the same font family.

To simplify this process DroidCustomFont was created.

Please keep in mind that using custom fonts can lead to the following potential bugs:

• Needed special characters (e.g. #) might be missing
• Internationalization might not be fully supported
• Ellipsizing can fail too, in case the special ellipsis character is not included in the font.

Therefore additional testing is strongly recommended!

How to use

###Getting Started (Eclipse) Import the DroidCustomFont project to your workspace and add a reference to it from your project. All needed steps can be found at developer.android: Referencing a library project

Integration

• Store all needed custom fonts as TTF files in "assets/fonts". At the moment this folder structure is mandatory. This may change in future versions of the library. **Important: ** Only include fonts with a suitable license!

• The base element of each layout xml file, that shall use custom fonts needs the app package name (not the library one) as additional namespace.

  In ADT 17.0.0 support was added for custom views with custom attributes in libraries using the following 'res-auto' uri that is replaced with the app specific one at build time. Using this variation instead of the package name of the base application also works for a gradle based build setup.

  The prefix can be chosen as wanted. This example uses "app".

xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto"

* Whenever a `TextView` is needed, use instead the class `CustomFontTextView` from the library . It can be layouted and styled in exactly the same way (except for `android:typeface` and `android:textStyle`).

* To assign a custom typeface via the complete filename use `app:fontname`
```java
<de.devmob.android.customfont.CustomFontTextView
    app:fontname="bowhouse_regular.ttf"

This replaces the need of assigning the custom font via code for each TextView.

Developed By

• The initial version was written by Friederike Wild - friederike.wild@devmob.de

• Used Fonts (Both under a Creative Commons Licence including for commercial use):

  • Bowhouse Font Family. Created 2013 by PYRS Fontlab Ltd.
  • BPdotsUnicase. Created 2007 by George Triantafyllakos (Backpacker.gr)

License

Copyright 2013 Friederike Wild

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.